Exit West(41)

One day she showed Saeed a little device that looked to him like a thimble. She was so happy, and he asked her why, and she said that this could be the key to the plebiscite, that it made it possible to tell one person from another and ensure they could vote only once, and it was being manufactured in vast numbers, at a cost so small as to be almost nothing, and he held it on his palm and discovered to his surprise that it was no heavier than a feather.

? ? ?

WHEN NADIA WALKED AWAY from their shanty, she and Saeed did not communicate for the rest of the day, nor on the day that followed. It was the longest cessation of contact between them since they had left the city of their birth. On the evening of their second day apart Saeed called her to ask how she was doing, to inquire if she was safe, and also to hear her voice, and the voice he heard was familiar and strange, and as they spoke he wanted to see her, but he withstood this, and they hung up without arranging a meeting. She called him the following evening, again a brief call, and after that they messaged or spoke to one another on most days, and while their first weekend apart passed separately, on the second weekend they agreed to meet for a walk by the ocean, and they walked to the sound of the wind and the crashing waves and in the hiss of the spray.

They met again for a walk the weekend after that, and again the weekend after that, and there was a sadness to these meetings, for they missed each other, and they were lonely and somewhat adrift in this new place. Sometimes after they met Nadia would feel part of herself torn inside, and sometime Saeed would feel this, and both teetered on the cusp of making some physical gesture that would bind them each to the other again, but both in the end managed to resist.

The ritual of their weekly walk was interrupted, as such connections are, by the strengthening of other pulls on their time, the pull of the cook on Nadia, of the preacher’s daughter on Saeed, and of new acquaintances. While the first shared weekend walk that they skipped was noticed sharply by them both, the second was not so much, and the third almost not at all, and soon they were meeting only once a month or so, and several days would pass in between a message or a call.

They lingered in this state of tangential connection as winter gave way to spring—though seasons in Marin seemed sometimes to last only for a small portion of a day, to change in the time that one took off one’s jacket or put on one’s sweater—and they lingered still in this state as a warm spring gave way to a cool summer. Neither much enjoyed catching unexpected glimpses of their former lover’s new existence online, and so they distanced themselves from each other on social networks, and while they wished to look out for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived, and also they grew less worried each for the other, less worried that the other would need them to be happy, and eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime.

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OUTSIDE MARRAKESH, in the hills, overlooking the palatial home of a man who might once have been called a prince and a woman who might once have been called a foreigner, there was a maid in an emptying village who could not speak and, perhaps for this reason, could not imagine leaving. She worked in the great house below, a house that had fewer servants now than it did in the year before, and fewer then than in the year before that, its retainers having gradually fled, or moved, but not the maid, who rode to work each morning on a bus, and who survived by virtue of her salary.

The maid was not old, but her husband and daughter were gone, her husband not long after their marriage, to Europe, from which he had not returned, and from which he had eventually stopped sending money. The maid’s mother had said it was because she could not speak and because she had given him a taste of the pleasures of the flesh, unknown to him before their marriage, and so she had armed him as a man and been disarmed by nature as a woman. But her mother had been hard, and the maid had not thought the trade a bad one, for her husband had given her a daughter, and this daughter had given her companionship on her journey through life, and though her daughter too had passed through the doors, she returned to visit, and each time she returned she told the maid to come with her, and the maid said no, for she had a sense of the fragility of things, and she felt she was a small plant in a small patch of soil held between the rocks of a dry and windy place, and she was not wanted by the world, and here she was at least known, and she was tolerated, and that was a blessing.

The maid was of an age at which men had stopped seeing her. She had had the body of a woman when she was still a girl, when she was married off, so young, and her body had ripened further after she birthed and nursed her child, and men had once paused to look at her, not at her face, but at her figure, and she had often been alarmed by those looks, in part because of the danger in them, and in part because she knew how they changed when she was revealed to be mute, and so the end of being seen was mostly a relief. Mostly, almost entirely, yet not entirely, for life had given the maid no space for the luxuries of vanity, but even so, she was human.

The maid did not know her age, but she knew she was younger than the mistress of the house where she worked, whose hair was still jet and whose posture was still erect and whose dresses were still cut with the intention to arouse. The mistress seemed not to have aged at all in the many years the maid had worked for her. From a distance she might be mistaken for a very young woman, while the maid seemed to have aged doubly, perhaps for them both, as if her occupation had been to age, to exchange the magic of months for bank notes and food.